Forty and First

The sheet smells like her soap. Not mine. I know that before I open my eyes. I know it the way you know a Sunday from a Monday, without proof, just a feeling in the bones of the room.

I'm in Elsie's bed.

I'm forty years old this morning. The thought lands on my chest like a cat that's decided to stay. I don't open my eyes right away. I listen to her breathe instead, slow and even on the other side of the mattress. She's still asleep. I can hear it. There's a kind of breathing a person only does in deep sleep, and she's doing it, and I'm lying here cataloguing it like it's data I'll need later.

Which I probably will.

I'm Annie. I'm forty as of some point today, I don't know the exact hour, my mother always said early morning but my mother also said a lot of things. Elsie is forty-two. She's lived three doors down from me in this building for three years, since the divorce. I knew all that before last night. I knew less than I thought I did, apparently.

My mouth is dry. Cheap white wine will do that. I crack one eye. Sunlight is coming through her window in a long slab, crawling up the sheet toward my knee. The window unit hums. Somewhere below, a truck is backing up with that beep beep beep, and the humidity is already pressing at the glass. It's going to storm later. You can tell. The air has that waiting quality, like the whole city is holding its breath.

I hold mine too.

Because here's what I'm facing. I spent the night with a woman. For the first time in my forty years, I spent the night with a woman, and it wasn't clumsy, and it wasn't a mistake, and now she's breathing that deep sleep breathing four inches from my shoulder and I don't know what you're supposed to do in the morning.

With a man, I'd know. I had two serious ones, both in my twenties. The last one ended when I was thirty-one, and since then it's been work and this building and rooftop summers and a slow quiet feeling that time was leaking out of the boat somewhere and I couldn't find the hole.

Okay. Eyes open. Both of them.

Her apartment is the same layout as mine, mirrored, so everything is where it shouldn't be and I keep almost walking into walls in my memory of last night. The bed is a queen, actual wood frame, not a mattress on the floor like mine. There's a reading lamp, a stack of paperbacks on the nightstand, a glass of water on my side. My side. She put a glass of water on my side before bed, or sometime in the night, and something about that makes my throat tight.

I turn my head. She's on her stomach, one arm up over her head, hair everywhere on the pillow. Forty-two and she sleeps like a sack of flour, flat out, like she trusts the morning to be there when she gets to it. Her back is bare above the sheet. I know that back now. My face goes hot just lying there thinking about it.

The night comes back in pieces.

The rooftop, first. The heat. This building has a tar-paper roof and a couple of plastic chairs and a forgotten ashtray that nobody's emptied since before either of us moved in, and in the summer half the tenants drift up there like moths. Last night it was just us. It was ninety degrees at ten o'clock, the kind of night where the brick gives back the day's heat after the sun's gone, and the harbor smells reach all the way inland, salt and diesel and somebody's garbage.

I brought up the bottle. Cheap white wine, eight dollars, the kind with a screw top. We split it sideways, which is a trick I learned from my father, pour slow with the bottle tipped low and you waste less. Elsie laughed at me doing it and I said what, and she said nothing, you're just full of things I don't know about you.

We'd known each other three years the way neighbors do. Trash room small talk. Holding the lobby door. The summer I twisted my ankle on the stairs she left a bag of frozen peas at my door with a note that said for the ankle, not the eyes, which I still think is the funniest thing anyone in this building has ever done. But we'd never sat together like that, just the two of us and a whole sky.

She asked it somewhere around the second glass. "So this is the last week of your thirties. What's forty mean to you?"

I remember I picked at the label on the bottle. I remember thinking I should give the joke answer, over the hill, blah blah, and I didn't. The heat had knocked something loose in me, or the wine, or the fact that she asked like she actually wanted to know.

"It feels like a deadline," I said. "Not for doing stuff. For having done stuff. Like, by forty you should know what you want, and have it, and if you don't, you've done everything wrong and there's no more runway."

She didn't laugh. She took a drink and looked out at the water towers, and the harbor lights past them, and said, "Thirty-nine was the year I learned what I actually wanted."

I waited. She's good at letting things sit, Elsie. She doesn't rush to fill a quiet. It's one of the things that made her hard to read for three years and one of the things that, sitting there in the dark with the city sweating below us, made me want to keep talking to her.

"And?" I finally said.

"And it wasn't what I thought it was when I was married. Twelve years, I was married. I spent most of them being the person I thought he needed and half of those being angry about it without knowing why." She rolled the bottle between her palms. "Thirty-nine, I stopped asking what I should want and started asking what I do want. Turns out it's smaller than I thought. Quieter. Somebody to sit on a roof with. Somebody who asks what forty means and waits for the real answer."

I remember my heart doing something stupid at that. I remember thinking, don't read into it, she's just talking, she's friendly, everybody knows that about her.

Then she looked at me. Really looked, in the way that has weight to it, and said, "What do you want, Annie? Not the deadline answer. The real one."

And God help me, I said it. Out loud. On a rooftop. To my neighbor.

"I want somebody to want me specifically. Not a role. Not somebody who'd take me or anybody. I've had two of those and they were fine and they were hollow. I want somebody who looks at me and it's me they're looking at." I took a drink because my mouth had gone dry again. "And I'm forty tomorrow and I've never had that and I'm scared that's it, that the boat's already left."

The wine was gone by then. The sky over the harbor had gone that deep city purple. She reached over and took the bottle out of my hands and set it down and she said, "Annie. Look at me."

I did.

"I've been looking at you specifically for about two years," she said. "I just didn't think you were looking back."

And that's when the night stopped being a night on a roof and became the thing I'm lying in now.

I piece the rest together in the dark behind my eyelids, in order, because I don't want to lose any of it. The walk down the fire escape, her hand on mine on the iron railing, both of us laughing about nothing. The ask. She asked. Plain as anything, she asked, and I said yes so fast it embarrassed me. Everything after that got its own question, its own yes, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world, like time was something you could spend slow on purpose.

Nobody had ever done that for me before. Asked at each door.

Beside me she stirs. Her breathing changes, that deep sleep rhythm breaking up, and my entire frame goes taut as a wire. She makes a small sound, half into the pillow, and her hand moves across the sheet and finds my hip like it knows where it's going.

"Hey," she says, voice thick with sleep. "Happy birthday."

I lie there with her hand warm on my hip and the storm building outside and I still don't know what you say next.

"Hi," I manage. Great. Forty years of talking and that's what I've got.

She opens one eye. She's got that look, the rooftop look, the one with weight in it. "You okay over there? You've been awake a while. I can tell. You breathe different when you're awake."

"Busted," I say.

"Talk to me," she says. Her thumb moves once against my hip, slow. "Whatever it is."

So I tell her some of it. Not all of it. The part I can say out loud before coffee.

"I keep replaying it," I say. "The roof. I don't want to lose the order of it."

She shifts onto her side, propping her head on her hand, and the sheet slides down and I make myself keep eye contact because we're adults, supposedly. "Okay," she says. "Start wherever."

"Your hand on my knee," I say. "When you said the thing about looking at me. Your hand just landed on my knee, kind of light, like you were asking something. And I nodded before you even asked anything."

"I did ask something," she says, and there's a smile in her voice. "You just didn't hear it with your ears."

"What was it?"

"I said, can I kiss you. Up on the roof, before we went inside. And you nodded. And then I said, not yet, not up here, too many windows. And you nodded again like a bobblehead."

God. I did. I remember that now, the second nod, how dumb I must have looked, forty years old tomorrow, nodding like my head had a loose screw. But here's what I remember clearest, the part that's been circling me all night like the storm circling the harbor. The climb.

My door was locked and I didn't care. That's the detail. Three years in that building and I have never once forgotten my keys, and last night I left them in my jacket pocket and did not even reach for them, because there was a fire escape right there, zigzagging down the brick, and her apartment is three doors from mine, mirrored, same layout, and her window on the landing was open because it was ninety degrees at ten o'clock and it never really cooled.

"You climbed that ladder like you'd done it before," she says. "I was behind you the whole way thinking, she's gonna break her other ankle, and also, don't look down, and also not at the stairs."

"You were looking at something specific, I bet."

"Annie."

"I'm just saying. You admitted to two years of looking."

"Two years of looking is not two years of touching," she says. "There's a difference. One of them I earned."

I laugh at that, a real one, and it comes out weird in the dark room, too loud, and somewhere below us a car alarm agrees with me and then shuts up. The storm's closer now. The air coming through her window has that electric smell, and under it the harbor, salt and diesel, the whole city breathing through the screen.

The fire escape. Okay. Her going first through the window, holding the frame, telling me watch the lip, there's a lip. My sneakers on her kitchen floor, tracking nothing, thank God, because she keeps that place like a museum and I keep mine in total chaos. Her standing in her kitchen with the streetlight coming through the blinds in stripes across her, and me standing there with wet palms and an eight-dollar empty wine bottle situation in my chest, and her saying, "We can just go to sleep. Let me say that first. That's a real option. Nothing has to happen."

And I remember thinking, this woman just handed me a door out and it made me want the other thing more, not less. That's how you know it's real, maybe. When the exit makes you stay.

"Bedroom," she'd said. "Water first. You had wine in the heat."

There was a siren passing below while we stood in her hallway. Red light slid across the wall through the window, slow, and she watched it pass like she was giving it permission to go by, and then she turned to me in her bedroom with the window open and the lamp off and just the street doing the lighting, and she touched my jaw. Two fingers. Light. Like the knee thing, a question in the shape of a touch.

And I nodded a third time, bobblehead Annie, and she said, "Words, honey. One word."

"Yes," I said. My voice did something embarrassing. "Yes."

The first kiss. I've been trying all night to file it somewhere and it won't file. It tasted like salt and wine and like the end of every excuse I'd ever made for myself. Every I'm too old and it's too late and what would people even say, all of it, gone, just dissolved on my tongue like the wine. Her mouth was soft and sure and she kissed me like she had all night, which she did, which we did, and my hands did not know what to do so they did everything at once, her back, her hair, the doorframe, anything.

"You were shaking," she says now, from the pillow.

"I was not."

"Your hands were shaking. I put mine over them. Right here." She reaches over and finds my hand under the sheet, laces our fingers. "See. Same spot."

I look at our hands. Her fingers are longer than mine, knuckles still a little rough from the gym she pretends she